Luis Landero
Author of Juegos de la edad tardía
About the Author
Image credit: Luis Landero at Book Fair 2017 at El Retiro Park on May 28, 2017 in Madrid, Spain
Works by Luis Landero
Tumbados y resucitados 3 copies
Lluvia fina 2 copies
Antes de la lluvia 2 copies
La vita negoziabile 1 copy
Coloquio de invierno 2026 1 copy
La ultima funcion 2024 1 copy
HOPY, JUPITER 1 copy
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Landero, Luis
- Legal name
- Landero Durán, Luis
- Birthdate
- 1948
- Gender
- male
- Short biography
- Luis Landero (Alburquerque, Badajoz, 1948) se licenció en filología hispánica por la Universidad Complutense, ha enseñado literatura en la Escuela de Arte Dramático de Madrid y fue profesor invitado en la Universidad de Yale (Estados Unidos). Se dio a conocer con Juegos de la edad tardía en 1989(Premio de la Crítica y Premio Nacional de Narrativa 1990), novela a la que siguieron Caballeros de fortuna (1994), El mágico aprendiz (1998), El guitarrista (2002), Hoy, Júpiter (2007, XV Premio Arcebispo Juan de San Clemente) y Retrato de un hombre inmaduro (2010), todas ellas publicadas por Tusquets Editores. Traducido a varias lenguas, Landero es ya uno los nombres esenciales de la narrativa española. Ha escrito además el emotivo ensayo literario Entre líneas: el cuento o la vida (2000), y ha agrupado sus piezas cortas en ¿Cómo le corto el pelo, caballero? (2004). Absolución, su novela más trepidante, es una delicada historia de amor, una cuenta atrás que no da tregua, y un inspirado relato de aprendizaje y sabiduría a través de un elenco de personajes inolvidables.
- Nationality
- Spain
- Birthplace
- Alburquerque, Spain
- Places of residence
- Badajoz (prov.), Spanje
- Associated Place (for map)
- Alburquerque, Spain
Members
Reviews
Landero describes sitting down to write a novel (he even gives us the first few pages of it) and then, as he looks down into the street from his Madrid balcony, having one of those "life's too short" moments that we all have from time to time as we get older. He feels that he's only going through the motions with fiction, and that he has something more important, more uniquely his own, that he needs to commit to paper before he gets to the end of his writing career.
Through a series of show more vignettes taken from his own memories and the testimony of his elderly mother and other family members and friends, he draws a picture of his family's life on the farm and in the small country town where he spent his early childhood (Alburquerque, on the Portuguese border in Extremadura), their migration to Madrid in 1960 and the various jobs he had as a teenager - shop-worker, apprentice mechanic, clerk, guitarist - and the slow discovery of the pleasures of the written word that eventually made him become first a student and then a teacher of literature.
Landero is not, of course, the first writer to come to the conclusion that the past is a foreign country, but he does give us a very clear insight into the astonishing and irreversible way that the world can change within a single lifetime, from the essentially illiterate, unmechanised peasant culture he was born into, in which oral storytelling and the passing on of knowledge from generation to generation was so central and papers, machines, and travel were things reserved for "la gente gorda" (the fat people - i.e. non-peasants), to the world he lives in now, where everything is written down and his most important manual skill is changing printer cartridges. The adult Luis can watch people passing in the street without knowing anything about them, and he can reflect on the beauty of the countryside he grew up in - both things that would have been incomprehensible to his grandparents.
For Luis's father, the discovery of the opportunities offered by the modern world outside the village seems to have far outweighed the horror of the things he experienced whilst serving in the Civil War, and in his ambitious mind it was Luis who was going to benefit from those opportunities and become one of the fat people, even if it meant that his mother and sisters had to turn their own Madrid apartment into a sweat-shop and work all hours of the day and night at their irons and their sewing-machines. But the father himself never manages to come to terms with the new life his ambitions have brought the family into - he can't find a job in the city that suits his idea of who he should be, he becomes a feared domestic tyrant instead of the loving husband and father Luis is sure he would have liked to be, he sleeps with a Chekhovian pistol under his pillow, and eventually depression gets the better of him.
Although some of the subject-matter of this story is pretty grim, it is really the childhood memories of peasant life before 1960 that shine through and stick in your mind after reading it. The grandmother's stories, the life of the farmyard and chicken-run, the magic of the journey between campo and pueblo and the plants, birds and landscape that served as landmarks along it, the pedlars who take the track over the border from Portugal with their donkeys and bicycles, the awful realisation that it will soon be October and time to go back to school. All wonderful, ordinary things it would be impossible to go back to without this kind of record of the memories of the dwindling group of people who can still remember them. show less
Through a series of show more vignettes taken from his own memories and the testimony of his elderly mother and other family members and friends, he draws a picture of his family's life on the farm and in the small country town where he spent his early childhood (Alburquerque, on the Portuguese border in Extremadura), their migration to Madrid in 1960 and the various jobs he had as a teenager - shop-worker, apprentice mechanic, clerk, guitarist - and the slow discovery of the pleasures of the written word that eventually made him become first a student and then a teacher of literature.
Landero is not, of course, the first writer to come to the conclusion that the past is a foreign country, but he does give us a very clear insight into the astonishing and irreversible way that the world can change within a single lifetime, from the essentially illiterate, unmechanised peasant culture he was born into, in which oral storytelling and the passing on of knowledge from generation to generation was so central and papers, machines, and travel were things reserved for "la gente gorda" (the fat people - i.e. non-peasants), to the world he lives in now, where everything is written down and his most important manual skill is changing printer cartridges. The adult Luis can watch people passing in the street without knowing anything about them, and he can reflect on the beauty of the countryside he grew up in - both things that would have been incomprehensible to his grandparents.
For Luis's father, the discovery of the opportunities offered by the modern world outside the village seems to have far outweighed the horror of the things he experienced whilst serving in the Civil War, and in his ambitious mind it was Luis who was going to benefit from those opportunities and become one of the fat people, even if it meant that his mother and sisters had to turn their own Madrid apartment into a sweat-shop and work all hours of the day and night at their irons and their sewing-machines. But the father himself never manages to come to terms with the new life his ambitions have brought the family into - he can't find a job in the city that suits his idea of who he should be, he becomes a feared domestic tyrant instead of the loving husband and father Luis is sure he would have liked to be, he sleeps with a Chekhovian pistol under his pillow, and eventually depression gets the better of him.
Although some of the subject-matter of this story is pretty grim, it is really the childhood memories of peasant life before 1960 that shine through and stick in your mind after reading it. The grandmother's stories, the life of the farmyard and chicken-run, the magic of the journey between campo and pueblo and the plants, birds and landscape that served as landmarks along it, the pedlars who take the track over the border from Portugal with their donkeys and bicycles, the awful realisation that it will soon be October and time to go back to school. All wonderful, ordinary things it would be impossible to go back to without this kind of record of the memories of the dwindling group of people who can still remember them. show less
Muy bien escrito, tragicomedia. El personaje principal está muy bien construído.
Juegos de la edad tardía
Luis Landero
Publicado: 1989 | 426 páginas
Novela Drama Humor
Los anhelos de una vida amorosa e intelectual inquieta que Gregorio alimentó en su juventud se habían esfumado cuando, convertido ya en un oficinista gris, conoce un día por teléfono a Gil , hombre modesto, maduro también, quien, tras largos años de exilio, acabó idealizándolo todo en mitos anacrónicos. Gil necesita a toda costa a un héroe-artista al que adherirse y, lentamente, consigue resucitar show more en Gregorio sus sueños juveniles y el deseo de convertirse en esa figura simbólica. Y ha lugar la metamorfosis de Gregorio en Faroni , personaje que ninguno de los dos nunca logró ser —ingeniero y poeta, trinfador, culto, políglota, apuesto, audaz en el amor, «progre», pero patética caricatura del artista trasnochado—. Cuando Gil va por fin a conocer a Gregorio , éste ya no puede volver atrás. Estos dos adolescentes otoñales han emprendido juegos demasiado peligrosos , y fortificado el uno por la feredentora del otro, ya no pueden sino fundirse para siempre en Faroni. show less
Luis Landero
Publicado: 1989 | 426 páginas
Novela Drama Humor
Los anhelos de una vida amorosa e intelectual inquieta que Gregorio alimentó en su juventud se habían esfumado cuando, convertido ya en un oficinista gris, conoce un día por teléfono a Gil , hombre modesto, maduro también, quien, tras largos años de exilio, acabó idealizándolo todo en mitos anacrónicos. Gil necesita a toda costa a un héroe-artista al que adherirse y, lentamente, consigue resucitar show more en Gregorio sus sueños juveniles y el deseo de convertirse en esa figura simbólica. Y ha lugar la metamorfosis de Gregorio en Faroni , personaje que ninguno de los dos nunca logró ser —ingeniero y poeta, trinfador, culto, políglota, apuesto, audaz en el amor, «progre», pero patética caricatura del artista trasnochado—. Cuando Gil va por fin a conocer a Gregorio , éste ya no puede volver atrás. Estos dos adolescentes otoñales han emprendido juegos demasiado peligrosos , y fortificado el uno por la feredentora del otro, ya no pueden sino fundirse para siempre en Faroni. show less
Caballeros de fortuna
Luis Landero
Publicado: 1994 | 270 páginas
Novela Drama
Una voz anónima, surgida de uno de esos grupos que asisten ociosos al espectáculo de las vidas ajenas, reconstruye un suceso en el que cinco destinos privados se van poco a poco entrelazando hasta convertirse en uno solo, colectivo: Esteban, el inocente, descubre de pronto el fascinante mundo del dinero, el lujo y el poder, y se empeñará a su manera en hacerse rico y poderoso; el pequeño Luciano, como para show more culminar el fervor religioso en el que le educaron, descubre el amor, un amor imposible, que sólo encontrará descanso en su plenitud; Belmiro, el viejo ilustrado, tras una vida de estudio, se topa de golpe con la irracionalidad de las pasiones; don Julio, comerciante de mercería, detecta un día en sí mismo insólitas dotes para convertirse en líder político; y Amalia se debate entre el amor transgresor hacia un adolescente y el afecto sereno que le ofrece un hombre otoñal. La fatalidad convierte estas vidas en una aventura en la que, como en las antiguas Ruedas de la Fortuna, se entrecruzarán la ruina y la muerte, el amor y la gloria. show less
Luis Landero
Publicado: 1994 | 270 páginas
Novela Drama
Una voz anónima, surgida de uno de esos grupos que asisten ociosos al espectáculo de las vidas ajenas, reconstruye un suceso en el que cinco destinos privados se van poco a poco entrelazando hasta convertirse en uno solo, colectivo: Esteban, el inocente, descubre de pronto el fascinante mundo del dinero, el lujo y el poder, y se empeñará a su manera en hacerse rico y poderoso; el pequeño Luciano, como para show more culminar el fervor religioso en el que le educaron, descubre el amor, un amor imposible, que sólo encontrará descanso en su plenitud; Belmiro, el viejo ilustrado, tras una vida de estudio, se topa de golpe con la irracionalidad de las pasiones; don Julio, comerciante de mercería, detecta un día en sí mismo insólitas dotes para convertirse en líder político; y Amalia se debate entre el amor transgresor hacia un adolescente y el afecto sereno que le ofrece un hombre otoñal. La fatalidad convierte estas vidas en una aventura en la que, como en las antiguas Ruedas de la Fortuna, se entrecruzarán la ruina y la muerte, el amor y la gloria. show less
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Statistics
- Works
- 32
- Members
- 1,252
- Popularity
- #20,487
- Rating
- 3.7
- Reviews
- 62
- ISBNs
- 96
- Languages
- 11
- Favorited
- 1
